Bodily expression of emotion

The question whether body movements and body postures are indicative of spe cific emotions is a matter of debate. While some studies have found evidenc e for specific body movements accompanying specific emotions, others indica te that movement behavior (aside from facial expression) may be only indica tive of the quantity (intensity) of emotion, but not of its quality. The st udy reported here is an attempt to demonstrate that body movements and past ures to some degree are specific for certain emotions. A sample of 224 vide o takes, in which actors and actresses portrayed the emotions of elated joy , happiness, sadness, despair, fear, terror, cold anger, hot anger, disgust , contempt, shame, guilt, pride, and boredom via a scenario approach, was a nalyzed using coding schemata for the analysis of body movements and postur es. Results indicate that some emotion-specific movement and posture charac teristics seem to exist, but that for body movements differences between em otions can be partly explained by the dimension of activation. While encode r (actor) differences are rather pronounced with respect to specific moveme nt and posture habits, these differences are largely independent from the e motion-specific differences found. The results are discussed with respect t o emotion-specific discrete expression models in contrast to dimensional mo dels of emotion encoding. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.